Monthly Archives: May 2014

In my on-going quest to break 1800, I’ve made a number of changes to my study habits. First, I swallowed my pride and returned to the basics, starting at the beginning of the Stappenmethode series of workbooks and working through each Step (and Step Plus) in turn. (I will have a review and discussion of the Steps Method in the weeks to come.) I also deprioritized openings and emphasized endings, especially the playing out of set endgame positions against human opponents or weak computer engines with clock and board.

Now, having received Jacob Aagaard’s newest book, I have enough training material for the endgame to last me many, many months.

Grandmaster Preparation: Endgame Play is the fifth book in the Grandmaster Preparation series. (See my review of the second book, Positional Play, for more information on the series as a whole.) Endgame Play is, at root, a collection of 430 endgame positions along with their solutions. They are grouped into twelve chapters; most of the chapters are constructed according to typical material, but the final three are devoted to key endgame themes. Approximately one-third of the positions are ‘pure’ rook endings.

Each chapter begins with a short introduction to the topic at hand, and this is followed by the positions for solving. Immediately the reader understands that this is not an endgame primer; for that, Aagaard recommends Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual and de la Villa’s 100 Endgames You Must Know. This is a workbook. Let me repeat this: this is a work-book. Of course you can just set up the positions on your board / screen and play through the answer, but the real purpose of Endgame Play (and, I think, the whole of the GM Prep project) is to whip your chess into shape through practice. It’s not just enough to ‘know’ the theory. If you can’t prove it OTB, it does you no good.

Let me give you an example from recent club play. On the board next to me on Monday night, a very promising junior lost a rook endgame where White had a 3-2 pawn advantage, but all pawns were on the kingside, no pawns were isolated or doubled, etc. The junior, playing Black, had seen some of the key defensive ideas in a previous training session, but either ‘forgot’ what to do or simply crumbled under time pressure. His practical strength was not equal to his theoretical knowledge, and so he lost a game that was completely drawn.

Aagaard’s prescription in Endgame Play is simple: the ambitious player must know the theoretical positions and she must be practiced in playing typical positions out. Dvoretsky is sufficient for the first part, but we must sit down and solve positions or, better, play them out with training partners if we are to gain practical experience. Endgame Play contains 430 positions ideally suited to this task.

Here’s a sample, taken from Chapter 7 (“Complex Minor Piece Endings”). Set up the position and take the White pieces against an engine like ExChess or against a human training partner. (Playing against Komodo or Houdini is just too depressing!) White is to move.

Ok. How did the game go? Compare it with Aagaard’s analysis and try to figure out where you went wrong. Do this enough and soon you’ll be squeezing full points out of half-points, and saving half-points where your position merits none. Practice may not make perfect, but it does make better. In an age of sudden-death time controls, that’s no small thing.

In his Foreword to Endgame Play, Karsten Müller specifically points to the chapters on opposite-colored bishops and rook and bishop vs rook and bishop as being exemplary. And so they are. For me, however, the material on rook endings is particularly useful, and the chapter on fortresses is absolutely fascinating. Because this is not a pedagogical work per se, some of the chapter introductions are slight. The introduction to the fortresses chapter is one of the longest in the book, and the illustrative examples work well to inspire ‘fortress hope’ in the reader.

It’s obvious that Aagaard poured immense time and effort into this book; on the Quality Chess Blog, he writes that he spent more time on Endgame Play than on any of his others. The analysis in Endgame Play is detailed enough to answer most every reader question, but it does not pretend to be encyclopedic. As Quality Chess books tend towards excessive analytical verbosity, this attempt at balance is appreciated.

The books in the Grandmaster Preparation series are “aimed at ambitious players.” Nowhere is this more true than with Endgame Play. I suspect that only the most dedicated of players under 2000 will truly benefit from Endgame Play, but ambition and dedication mean more than playing strength in this situation. The class player who puts in the time and work solving the positions in this book will undoubtedly see a jump in her endgame skills and her rating. The aspiring master should tear through these pages and devour every problem. This is a fine book, possibly the finest of the Grandmaster Preparation series, and it is a book that is well worth your purchase.